Peter Wilson explores the Bremer Landesbank, Caruso St John’s homage to brick expressionism in Bremen

Words
Peter Wilson
Photos
Hélène Binet

According to Adolf Loos, a bank facade should say “Here your money is secure and well looked after by honest people”. Today, post-Lehman, this seems an almost laughable idea, but Caruso St John has taken up the challenge in Bremen. The brick edifice for the Bremer Landesbank is directly behind the neo-Gothic town hall and the cathedral – a UNESCO World Heritage ensemble. To the right is the red sandstone Deutsche Bank (another financial institution in crisis, with multiple legal actions pending and criticisms of its anti-money-laundering control in Russia– a boon for satirists who quip: “I didn’t know that was illegal”).

In its competition blurb, Caruso St John interpreted the heavy neo-Renaissance style of its neighbours as horizontally ordered. For contrast, and to associate with the eclectic Gothic revival surrounds, the Bremer Landesbank thematicises the vertical. This also echoes the north-German genre of Brick Expressionism – Fritz Höger’s Chilehaus (1924) was referenced in Caruso St John’s competition submission.

As a member of the jury I well remember seductive elevations of deep chocolate-brown brickwork. On visiting the now completed bank, one is therefore surprised and not a little disappointed that the overall impression is of a dusty grey – a shortcoming (easily tweakable in Photoshop) brought about by the absence of the dark verticals that gave rhythm to the initial drawings. Interspersed pasty decorative motifs, perhaps Lego-Technic inspired, also weaken the whole. But maybe the leaden North Sea skies are to blame.

Coffered dome and lantern of Francesco Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, Rome (1646, ph: PW)

Caruso St John is in the habit of under-pinning its work with Italian references; in Italy, strong chiaroscuro will not let you down. Scalloped curves which appear to be derived from the lantern of that ultimate of Baroque references, Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, is a preferred trope, appearing first in a 2004 competition win in Ascona, a building which looked like it was designed by attacking a lump of clay with an ice-cream scoop. Again in 2014, a mega scoop-scrape delivered a columnless colonnade at the base of the premiated Biomedicine Faculty in Basel.

Banking hall with concertina inversion of the entrance

Following this run of Swiss wins one looks for evidence of the ice-cream scoop in Bremen. It is the first thing one encounters, at the entrance to the white Nordic-salon banking hall – multiple arches scooped out from a cube of brick. It’s an impressive tectonic essay of iterating corbels, an entrance cube that anchors its corner, a block from an XL toybox interrupting a facade of narrow filigree verticals (these are also individually scooped, as if by the bankers inside). Concertina-like entrance corbels also push into the banking hall, a manneristic device hotly disputed by the competition jury; somewhere there has to be that Tommy Cooper ‘hat-rabbit’ moment, dark brick transmuting to abstract white. Caruso St John has obviously dwelt on this moment. Not hiding the transition behind the frame of the glass entrance doors, they slip it slightly inside as a skilful if uneasy decorative and didactic zip of interlocking brick and white ceramic tiles.

Brick-lined passage from street to central courtyard

From the banking hall the interior of the Bremer Landesbank unfolds theatrically as a sequence of carefully detailed spatial characters. But before entering, a glance at the plan is necessary. The plot is rectangular, a half-block from which Caruso St John has carved out (one could almost say scooped out) an internal courtyard – a plan diagram for cognoscenti, as it unashamedly recycles Lewerentz’s 1930 Social Security Administration building in Stockholm. Both are internal oval courts, lined by unrelenting windows, hermetic in the extreme but connected to the outside world by a tunnel. In Bremen the tunnel is a dark brick vault (cousin of the entrance box), a ritual passage of transition through which bank employees pass on their way to check in at the back of the court. Here, as throughout the interior, the formal and the calmly efficient are masterfully married.

On upper levels the oval court is lined by a circus of cellular offices. German regulations only allow work places within six metres of a window (the functionalist credo demands daylight and air from an openable window as a basic human right, even for bankers). Thus, the invention of the court gives all 350 employees their own window. Offices are of an exceptionally high standard, but the Swiss minimalist detailing of the two fire-escape stairs is sublime. The Bremer Landesbank is, after all, a product of Caruso St John’s Zürich office.

My friend Valerio Olgiati once said to me “I don’t know why we Swiss are so impressed by these wannabe-Swiss architects who come here doing what we did five years ago” – harsh criticism indeed, but the Swiss have in their veins a draconian or perhaps Calvinist (‘correct/unacceptable’) rule system for measuring architecture.

In reviewing Caruso St John’s work, one is also reminded of the German philosopher Theodor Adorno’s book ‘The Jargon of Authenticity’, a pulling the rug out from under Martin Heidegger (‘Building Dwelling Thinking’) and even Walter Benjamin’s propagation of the ‘auratic’, which Adorno argued was a mystifying of the relationship between language and its objective content.

Caruso St John wears the badge of authenticity – they are poetic zealots who claim the high ground, as did the Smithsons – and is also in the habit of caustically putting down architectural novelty, cynical post-modernism and (gasp) that misdemeanour of which so many of us are guilty, faux-modernism. In Bremen it has delivered a powerful, only slightly flawed, affirmation of Kenneth Frampton’s ‘Critical Regionalism’.

Additional Images

Credits